MOSCOW, June 9: One man was reported killed and 30 other people hurt Sunday as rampaging soccer fans in Moscow torched cars, smashed shops and battled police after Russia’s 1-0 defeat to Japan in Yokohama.

Police said the man died from stab wounds as mass brawls erupted on Manezh Square near the Kremlin where some 3,000 fans had been watching the game in Japan on a giant outdoor screen, Interfax quoted city police as saying.

A policeman received serious stab wounds and two other officers were also hurt, news agencies said. Thirty people were taken to hospital with various injuries.

However, Interfax later quoted Moscow’s top police officer General Vladimir Pronin as saying he had yet to see concrete proof that anyone had been stabbed to death.

Thick, black smoke billowed from seven torched cars outside the landmark Moskva Hotel and the State Duma lower house of parliament, scenes not witnessed in central Moscow since the storming of the previous parliament in 1993.

Sunday’s disturbances, barely 100 metres (yards) from the Kremlin’s red walls, were the worst football-related violence to hit Russia since 2000, when two teenagers died in separate incidents after soccer matches.

Angry fans attacked cars and vans parked near the Moskva hotel, including those belonging to state-run RTR television which had broadcast the match, smashing windscreens and overturning others.

Around 20 vehicles were damaged, said police.

The rioters hurled bottles, sticks and other missiles at the police. Broken glass and plastic bottles, poles that during the match had held the Russian tricolour aloft, littered the main thoroughfare that abuts Manezh Square.

Interfax said one drunken fan in a car had run down three pedestrians. Their condition was not known.

As riot police marshalled their forces and moved in to disperse the crowds, fire-fighters doused burning vehicles, a plume of smoke climbing over some of Moscow’s best-known sites.

The violence spilled into adjoining districts, an estimated 300 hooligans streaming up the main Tverskaya Street, Itar-Tass news agency. According to Ekho Moskvy radio, some of them attacked a Japanese restaurant there.

“I don’t like everything that is happening here. People gathered to watch (the game) and now there is this disorder. This isn’t right,” said another fan, Alexei.

The disturbances took place within a bottle’s throw of the Kremlin but President Vladimir Putin, himself an avid sports fan, was away in his hometown, the second city St Petersburg, ahead of a meeting of Baltic states leaders.

But Alexei Volin, the deputy head of the Russian government administration, condemned the violence, saying it brought shame on the nation.

“These events discredit millions of normal people who supported the national team,” he told the RIA news agency. The rioters “have nothing to do with sports or sports fans”, he said, adding the troublemakers should be punished.

Some fans blamed heavy-handed policing for triggering the violence, but police said hooligans who had spent much of the match drinking had started the unrest.

“The police just began to beat people. There was just a release of energy and the police began beating people,” one fan, who gave his name as Nikita, told Reuters.